Posts Tagged ‘machine learning’

Since we began the process of building applications using our AI engine, we have been focused on working with ideas or concepts. With BrainDocs we built intelligent agents to find and score similarity for ideas in paragraphs, but still fell short of the vision we have for our solution. Missing was an intuitive and visual UI to explore content interactively using multiple concepts and metadata (like dates, locations, etc). We want to give our users the power to create a rich and personal context to power through their research. What do I call this?

Some Google research led me to a great visualization and blog by David McCandless on the Taxonomy of Ideas. While the words in his viz are attributes of ideas, not the ideas themselves, it got me thinking in different ways about the problem.

If you substitute an idea (product or problem) in David’s matrix and add the dimension of time, you create a useful framework. If the idea above was “car”, then the top right might be Tesla and bottom left a Yugo (remember those?). Narrow the definition to “electric car” or generalize to “eco-friendly personal transportation” and the matrix changes. But insert an unsolved problem and now you have trouble applying the attributes. You also arrive at an innovator’s dilemma (not the seminal book by Clayton Christensen), the challenge of researching something that hasn’t been labeled and categorized yet.

Ideas begin in someone’s head. With research, debate, and engineering, they become products. Products have labels and categories that facilitate communication, search and commerce. The challenge for idea search on future problems is that the opposite occurs: products are not yet ideas and the problems they solve may not have been defined yet. If I may, Donald Rumsfeld nailed the problem with this famous quote:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

And if it’s an unknown unknown, it certainly hasn’t been labeled yet so how do you search for it? Our CEO Walt Diggelmann used to say it this way, “ai-one gives you an answer to a question, you did not know that you have to ask….! “

Innovators work in this whitespace.

If you could build and combine different intelligent (idea) agents for problems as easily as you test different combinations of words in a search box, you could drive an interactive and spontaneous exploration of ideas. In some ways this is the gift of our intelligence. New ideas and innovation are in great part combinatorial, collaborative and stimulated by bringing together seemingly unrelated knowledge to find new solutions.

Instead of pumping everything into your brain (or an AI) and hoping the ideas pop out, we want to give you the ability to mix combinations of brains, add goals and constraints and see what you can create. Matt Ridley termed this “ideas having sex”. This is our goal for Topic-Mapper (not the sex part).

So what better place to apply this approach than to the exploration of space? NASA already created a “taxonomy of ideas” for the missions of the next few decades. In my next blog I’ll describe the demo we’re working on for the grandest of the grand challenges, human space exploration.

If the real life Tony Stark and technology golden boy, Elon Musk, is worried that AI is an existential threat to humanity, are we doomed? Can mere mortals do anything about this when the issue is cloaked in dozens of buzzwords and the primary voices on the subject are evangelists with 180 IQs from Singularity University? Fortunately, you can get smart and challenge them without a degree in AI from MIT.

“Smarter Than Us – The Rise of Machine Intelligence” by Stuart Armstrong can also be downloaded at iTunes.

“It will sharpen your focus to see AI from a different view. The book does not provide a manual for Friendly AI, but its shows the problems and it points to the 3 critical things needed. We are evaluating the best way for ai-one to participate in the years ahead.” Walt Diggelmann, CEO ai-one.

In Chapter 11 Armstrong recommends we take an active role in the future development and deployment of AI, AGI and ASI. The developments are coming; the challenge is to make sure AI plays a positive role for everyone. A short summary:

“That’s Where You Come In . . .

There are three things needed—three little things that will make an AI future bright and full of meaning and joy, rather than dark, dismal, and empty. They are research, funds, and awareness.

Research is the most obvious.
A tremendous amount of good research has been accomplished by a very small number of people over the course of the last few years—but so much more remains to be done. And every step we take toward safe AI highlights just how long the road will be and how much more we need to know, to analyze, to test, and to implement.

Moreover, it’s a race. Plans for safe AI must be developed before the first dangerous AI is created.
The software industry is worth many billions of dollars, and much effort (and government/defense money) is being devoted to new AI technologies. Plans to slow down this rate of development seem unrealistic. So we have to race toward the distant destination of safe AI and get there fast, outrunning the progress of the computer industry.

Funds are the magical ingredient that will make all of this needed research.
In applied philosophy, ethics, AI itself, and implementing all these results—a reality. Consider donating to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), or the Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). These organizations are focused on the right research problems. Additional researchers are ready for hire. Projects are sitting on the drawing board. All they lack is the necessary funding. How long can we afford to postpone these research efforts before time runs out? “

About Stuart: “After a misspent youth doing mathematical and medical research, Stuart Armstrong was blown away by the idea that people would actually pay him to work on the most important problems facing humanity. He hasn’t looked back since, and has been focusing mainly on existential risk, anthropic probability, AI, decision theory, moral uncertainty, and long-term space exploration. He also walks the dog a lot, and was recently involved in the coproduction of the strange intelligent agent that is a human baby.”

Since ai-one is a part of this industry and one of the many companies moving the field forward, there will be many more posts on the different issues confronting AI. We will try to keep you updated and hope you’ll join the conversation on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. AI is already pervasive and developments toward AGI can be a force for tremendous good. Do we think you should worry? Yes, we think it’s better to lose some sleep now so we don’t lose more than that later.

New Partnership Targets Creation of Social Media Intelligence Tools

Press Release

New tools will enable machine learning of twitter feeds

La Jolla CA | Zurich | Berlin February 16 2012 – ai-one inc. and Gnostech Inc. announced a partnership today to build new machine learning applications for the US government and military. The deal brings together two small firms that are well known for developing cutting-edge technologies. Gnostech specializes in simulation and modeling, Command Control Communications Computers and Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems and security engineering and Information Assurance (IA) applications. The partnership with ai-one provides Gnostech with access to technology that enables computers to learn the meaning and context of data in a way that is similar to humans. Called “biologically inspired intelligence” the technology is a new form of machine learning that is particularly useful for understanding complex, unstructured information – such as conversations in social media.

In the past month, the US government has issued six requests for companies to create solutions to help better understand Twitter, Facebook and other social media sources. These broad area announcements (BAAs) are formal requests from the Government to invite companies to provide turn-key solutions. With more than 800 million people actively using Facebook and more than 100 million Twitter users, governments and intelligence agencies know that they need better ways to mine this data to get real-time information to protect national security.“

We now have more than 40 partners worldwide that are experimenting with our technology – but only 3 that specialize in US government applications,” said Tom Marsh, President of ai-one. “Gnostech is local, technically driven and well positioned to develop rapid prototypes using our technology.”

About Gnostech, Since 1981, Gnostech has provided technical and engineering services to the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Gnostech has a proven reputation for engineering efficiency, systems innovation, and dedicated customer service.

Gnostech Inc. began as an engineering and consulting company in Warminster, PA with expertise in GPS simulations and software, initially supporting the US Navy at the Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Warminster, PA. Today, Gnostech has grown from a few people to about 50 employees with a satellite office in San Diego, CA and engineering support staff in Norfolk, VA, Morristown, NJ and Philadelphia, PA. Gnostech’s technical expertise expands upon our GPS experience and extends into Mission Planning, Network Engineering, Information Assurance and Security Engineering. www.gnostech.com

We believe we have found a new approach to apply a new general purpose machine learning technology to solve domain-specific problems by mining unstructured text. The solution addresses fundamental problems in knowledge management:

How to find information that is difficult to describe?

For example, you want to find a match between two people to fill an empty job position. What attributes do you use to represent a complex subject (like a person) to find the best fit?

What if the single best answer is hidden within a vast amount of unstructured text?

Let’s say you want to repurpose a drug – such as using the side-effect of a chemical to treat a disease using a newly discovered metabolic pathway. How would you search through the 21+ million research articles in PubMed to find the best match from more than 2,000+ known drug compounds?

What if the textual information is constantly changing?

What if you want to provide personalized marketing to a person based on what they are saying on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? To do this, you must understand the meaning of what they are saying. The most accurate approach is to have people read and interpret the conversations because we are fantastic at understanding the complexity of language. But to do this with a computer requires a different approach: Machines must learn like humans. They must understand how meaning evolves in a conversation, how to disambiguate, how to detect the single most important concepts, etc.

Big Data Means Big Opportunity

These are classic “Big Data” problems – and they are rampant. Finding a solution would change everything; from how we discover new drugs to what social media would tell us about ourselves.

There have been many attempts to find ways for machines to learn like a human. Artificial intelligence has made bold promises that have been consistently broken for more than 50 years. Yet, we still don’t have a universal approach for machines to learn and understand language like a human.

Now, more than ever, we need to find a new approach to mine unstructured text. As of February 2012, it is estimated that the Internet has more than 614 million websites. More than 1.8 zettabytes of information was created in 2011 – more than much of it unstructured text from our comments on websites, news articles, social media feeds… just about anything where people are communicating with language rather than numbers.

Unstructured text can’t be processed like structured data. Rather it requires an approach that enables knowledge representation in a form that can be processed by machines.

Knowledge representation is a rich field and there has been tremendous effort and innovation – too many to describe here. However, we still live in a world where the overwhelming majority of people (including almost every CIO, developer and consumer) CANNOT find the information they seek with a simple query. Rather, the domain of data mining text analytics is dominated by specialists who use tools that are very difficult to learn and very expensive to deploy (because they require highly skilled programmers).

We set out to create a new toolset that would be easy to use for almost any programmer to build data mining tools for unstructured text.

ai-browser: A prototype for human-machine collaboration

For the past several months, we have been working on a new approach for text analytics and data mining. The idea is to create a tool that enables human-machine collaboration to quickly mine unstructured data to find the single best answer.

We now have a working prototype, called ai-browser, that solves knowledge management and data mining problems involving unstructured text. It combines natural language processing (NLP) and pattern recognition technologies to generate a precise knowledge representation graph. Our team selected OpenNLP because it is open-source, easy to use and customize. We used the Topic-Mapper API to detect patterns within the text after it was pre-processed to isolate parts of speech. The system also allows users to use ontologies and/or reference documents to sharpen the results. The output is a graph that can be used in a number of ways with 3rd party products, such as:

This graph makes it easy to ask questions like, “Find me something like _______!” and get a very tightly clustered group of results – rather than millions of hits.

Even more impressive, ai-browser’s graph is a powerful tool that can be applied to a wide range of applications, such as:

Healthcare – clinical decision support systems to enable physicians to make better decisions by understanding all the relevant information held in electronic medical records (EMRs) – including emerging trends and relationships within the patient population.

Social media – detecting and tracking sentiments in conversations over time (such as Twitter) to understand how brands are perceived by customers.

Innovation management – discovering the relationships of information across disciplines to foster more productive collaboration and interdisciplinary discoveries.

Information comparison and confirmation – determine the similarities and differences between two different sources of content.

Human resources – sourcing and placement of the best candidate for a job based on previous work experience.

The intent of the ai-browser design is to provide a starting point for developers to build solutions to meet the specific needs of enterprise customers. For example, modifying the system enables solutions to the following use cases:

Help a physician determine if additional tests are necessary to confirm a diagnosis.

Determine how perceptions about a brand are change through conversations on Twitter.

Find new uses for a drug by reviewing clinical studies published on PubMed and determining if there are relevant patent filings.

Identify stock market trading opportunities by comparing news feeds and SEC filings on a particular company or industry.

Finding the best person for a job by searching the internet for someone that is “just like person who has this job last year.”

Enterprise Data Mining: A far easier, lower cost approach.

Unlike other data mining approaches, ai-browser learns the meaning of documents by generating a lightweight ontology – a dynamic file that describes every relationship between every data element. It detects keywords and their association words which provide context. The combination of a keyword and all the association words can be thought of as a coordinate (x,y0->T) where x is the keyword and y0->T is the series of association words for that specific keyword. The collection of these coordinates creates a topology for the document: G(V,E) where G is graph and V is the set of vertices (or nodes) represented by each keyword and E is the edge represented by the associations to the keyword.

We call this graph the “ai-fingerprint.” It is a lossless knowledge representation model. It captures the meaning of the document by showing the context of words and the clustering of concepts. It is lossless because it captures every relationship in a directed graph – thereby revealing the significance of a word that may only appear once yet is central to the meaning of a large, complex textual data set.

ai-browser expresses ai-fingerprints uses the XGMML format in REST. This enables it to accommodate dynamic data, so it can change as the underlying text changes (such as in text from social media feeds).

Contact Olin Hyde to schedule a demo of ai-Browser. The source code is available to programmers to license and modify to solve specific problems.

Use Case Summary:

The BON Matcher is an ai-one implementation enabling a leading swiss retail store to analyze all scanned credit card receipts.

After the scan process, all credit card receipts are analyzed and matched against patterns using a-one’s API.

Our solution corrects the errors of the optical character recognition (OCR) system when it fails to recognize 100% of the elements.

This was an early validation of our technology. It affirmed ai-one’s superiority over alternative artificial intelligence-based solutions as a much faster, better quality, and less expensive solution. The retail chain saved substantial operating costs by automating this process and was able to reduce its workforce by 15 people.

The project was finished after 3 months of development time and is still being used for more than 80 stores.

The feature of the technology used in this application is commonly used in document archiving systems where users need to search for documents that have been scanned with many character errors.

Benefits:

Improved OCR performance from 80% to 98% in less than a week after implementation.

Press Release

San Diego CA | October 20, 2011 – Did you miss the wave? Artificial intelligence is transforming entire industries by finding value in big, complex data.

The San Diego Online Society (SANDIOS) will host a public seminar on Thursday November 17 on how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by leading edge companies around the world.

Recent advances in AI technology make it easy to build machines that can learn like humans. Now almost any programmer can build systems like Apple’s SIRI and IBM Watson by combining off-the-shelf technologies. A leading vendor of machine learning technology, ai-one, will present case studies from a wide range of customers. The seminar will focus on showing practical ways businesses can use AI.

Questions that will be addressed:

What is AI & why everything you think you know about AI has changed

Business uses for ai-one technology

Demo of a cutting edge AI application

AI incubation models

How to succeed with building an AI business

AI Product strategy

The event will be hosted by Jones Day which specializes in intellectual property and business law.